I think part of the "problem" is that some people fail to understand the difference between the ability to read a single line of a program and to be able to read the program itself. It's true that a single random line of a Visual Basic program is easier to read and understand than a single random line of a Perl one. The problem that they fail to see is that there's about fivety times more lines in the VB program than there would be in a Perl one with the same functionality. So they know what each single line does, but once they tried to understand the functions they would quickly find out that the complexity is still there. It just wasn't aparent from the looks of the lines.